U.S. Olympians Drive BMWs Down Bobsled Track in Chase for Gold

Michael Scully, creative director of BMW DesignWorksUSA, stands for a photograph with a foam model of the US Olympic Team bobsled designed at BMW Group DesignWorksUSA in Newbury Park, California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- BMW designer Michael Scully had
raced cars and snowboards, so he wasn’t expecting any surprises
when took his first ride in a bobsled as part of the German
automaker’s efforts to help the U.S. team succeed at the Sochi
Games.

About a minute later, after the “incredible violence and
vibration” of a 70 mile per hour (113 kilometer per hour) run
down the icy track at Lake Placid, New York, Scully understood
the challenges he faced in creating a better bobsled.

As part of its six-year sponsorship with the U.S. Olympic
Committee, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG assigned Scully with his
20 years of experience designing race cars to help American men
win their first two-man bobsled Olympic medal since 1952. His
first task was to “quiet the chaos” that made his first
bobsled ride so memorable.

“Just the brutality and the violence of it was something
that really left an impact on me,” Scully, 42, said in an
interview at the BMW Group DesignworksUSA studio in Newbury
Park, California, about 45 miles (71 kilometers) northwest of
Los Angeles. “As a designer, it’s your responsibility to look
at those experiences and try to leverage those into design
directions.”

While engineers at BMW headquarters in Munich were helping
the three-time defending champion German two-man bobsled team
prepare for the Feb. 7-23 Olympics in Russia, Scully and his BMW
team were doing the same for American bobsledders amid the palm
trees and surfboards of southern California.

Olympic bobsledding has been dominated by men from Alpine
nations such as Germany, Switzerland and Italy since it debuted
at the first Winter Games in 1924. At 2010 in Vancouver, the
American men won their first gold medal in the four-man event
since 1948. U.S. men have not won gold in a two-man sled since
1936.

Sixty-Nine Designs

Using computer design tools, it took 69 virtual designs for
Scully to create his new sled. A prototype was then built with
the lightweight carbon fiber BMW uses in its latest all-electric
vehicles, then tested in a wind tunnel.

BMW usually does its wind-tunnel testing in Germany. Since
engineers at BMW headquarters were working with the German
bobsledders, Scully’s team signed a confidentiality agreement
with the Americans that barred sharing information -- so the
testing was done in the U.S.

The resulting two-man sleds, six of which were built for
the U.S. men’s and women’s teams, are shorter and have vastly
different weight distribution than their predecessors -- sleds
built starting in 1992 as part of the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project
funded by Nascar driver Geoff Bodine and used in the Olympics
from 1994 to 2010.

Bobsled Tank

“My previous sled was sort of built like a tank, it was
built to withstand crashes,” Elana Meyers, who won a bronze
medal as a brakeman on a two-woman sled at the 2010 Vancouver
Olympics and now is the driver of one of the U.S. women’s sleds,
said in a telephone interview. “These new BMW sleds are built
to go fast and to push the envelope.”

The International Bobsleigh Federation’s 74-page rulebook
mandates a minimum weight of 170 kilograms (375 pounds) for an
empty two-man bobsled. Scully’s challenge was to redistribute
that weight on the sleds.

His sleeker design moved weight from the front to the
center of the sleds, improving handling and maintaining momentum
during all the high-speed directional changes on the track.

“One thing I really like about the BMW is we’re able to
put weight in the right places with the carbon-fiber body,”
U.S. driver Steve Holcomb said in a telephone interview. “This
sled is 45-50 kilos lighter. You have to add that weight back
in, but we can decide where to put it.”

Size Adjustments

Holcomb, who is 5-foot-10 (1.78 meters) and weighs 220
pounds, had to make some adjustments jumping into the smaller
sled. After that, he won the first four two-man races on the
World Cup circuit this season. At Lake Placid on Dec. 14, the
U.S. men swept all three podium spots in a two-man race for the
first time in World Cup history.

Holcomb won this World Cup season’s two-man bobsled
championship, finishing 35 points ahead of Switzerland’s Beat
Hefti for the title.

Holcomb, 33, who piloted the four-man sled in Vancouver to
victory, was the driver when Scully -- “screaming the entire
way,” Holcomb said -- took his test run in October 2011.

Holcomb joined Darrin Steele, chief executive officer of
the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation, in giving feedback to
Scully after the first prototype was tested in March 2012.

“With the BMW sleds, the idea is let’s pick a design we
know is fast and make it faster, and you do that with
workmanship,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “The BMW
brand, they’re pretty precise in everything they do, having them
scrutinize the different parts and pieces was good.”

Junior Snowboarder

Scully, who was on the Burton Snowboards junior team as a
teenager in New Hampshire and raced open-cockpit cars until
2010, said lessons learned from designing a bobsled can be
translated into innovations on BMW cars.

“Designing something that has to experience so many varied
positions as it goes down the track, that’s a new level of
aerodynamic challenge compared to what a car would have
experienced typically,” said Scully, the creative director at
Designworks.

Selling Cars

Scully and Trudy Hardy, head of marketing for BMW of North
America, declined to say how much the bobsled design program
cost BMW. Hardy said it grew out of the six-year sponsorship
deal the carmaker signed with the U.S. Olympic Committee in
2010.

The Associated Press reported in 2010 that BMW’s USOC
sponsorship was for a total of $24 million. BMW spokeswoman
Stacy Morris said she could not confirm that figure, though she
said in an e-mail that “our Olympic partnership marketing is
our biggest marketing investment for BMW in the U.S. this
year.”

Hardy said American success in the bobsled can help BMW
sell cars.

“I believe it has a positive influence on the brand,”
Hardy said in a telephone interview. “It’s a really meaningful
activation and it gets in the hearts and minds of customers.”

Tiny Margins

Meyers, Holcomb and Steele all said the new sleds are just
one element in creating a winning Olympic team, along with the
talents of the two competitors. They agreed, however, that all
the BMW design work can make a significant difference.

“Races are won by hundredths of a second,” Steele said.
“It’s maddening to think after all this we’ve maybe improved
only a tenth of a second, but a tenth of a second over four runs
is pretty significant.”